This week, before I start next week into the end-of-season routine
sequence with the conference races, I want to throw out one more fairly
important piece of statistical analysis. On the small side, it's the
answer to the question, "If Kellen Kulbacki is playing center field and
Evan Longoria is playing third base, how much do you adjust the stats to
allow for the differing positional value when voting for Player of the
Year?" On the large side, it's the question of how much you adjust
offensive stats when trying to determine the value of a college player
to his team. That question doesn't take quality of defense into
consideration, really; it's just a question of whether a player plays a
position well enough that you're willing to live with him there and how
much value he loses when he slides to an easier position.

There are two conflicting pieces of evidence to consider when thinking
about this issue before looking at the actual numbers, which are hard to
get. On the one hand, you'd expect that the hardest positions to defend
would have fewer candidates and, therefore, would have the worst offensive
numbers. Historically, that's been true at the Major League level,
although in recent years there have been a few players like Alex Rodriguez
and Mike Piazza who hit as well as anyone and are good enough athletes to
play a difficult position as well, which has resulted in some oddities like
shortstops being around the middle of the pack most years these days in
MLB. On the other end, where did the best hitter on your Little League
team play? Right, he was either the pitcher or the shortstop (or both,
most likely, in different games), since pure athletic ability tends to
express itself on both sides of the ball. This part of the curve actually
holds on both ends of the age curve, as everyone who was good enough to
play college baseball ends up playing shortstop in church-league slow
pitch.

Where, then, does college baseball fall on this spectrum?

Before I throw out the numbers, a word about methodology: Positional data
for college players en masse is quite hard to come by. Rosters tend to
contain helpful entries like "INF" or the always wonderful "Fr.,
INF/LHP/OUTF". The last couple of years, though, I've maintained a
mostly complete archive of box scores as the season goes, and I've
parsed out the positional data with surprising accuracy, so that's the
source of my player identification. For this study, all of a player's
stats are counted for the position that he plays most often, and only
players who have played at least ten games at their most common
position are counted.

Here, then are the offensive numbers by position for the 2006 season to
date:

There are no huge surprises here, although I suppose it's hard to be
surprised when you have two acceptable conflicting theories and a
willingness to accept something in between. It's interesting that there's
an apparent counterpart to the athleticism of shortstop going in that means
that college center fielders are hitting right in the middle of their
corner brethren despite playing a tougher position. The spread here is
actually rather small; the difference in the average first baseman and the
average second baseman is only about 8%. DH's don't hit nearly as well as
you'd expect someone with no glove to hit. Except for the catchers and DH's,
almost all of the difference between positions is in slugging; OBP is
fairly consistent except for those two.

One final point that needs to be made is that there's a difference in
quality and value. An average-hitting center fielder is probably a
"better" player than an average-hitting left fielder; he plays a more
difficult position and is more likely to be of value at a higher level.
However, he's not more valuable to his college team, since, essentially,
everybody has one.

Tournament Watch

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament.
I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since
the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one
team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the
automatic bid.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.